1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to speech processing and more specifically to suppressing ambient noise to improve audio quality for speech processing.
2. Introduction
Most, if not all, current Human-Computer Interface (HCI) systems and/or audio-enabled communication devices, such as cell-phones or conference systems, provide some sort of signal processing during the audio capture stage to suppress ubiquitous ambient noise. Suppressing ambient noise can enhance audio quality and clarity. However, when suppressing ambient noise, special care should be taken to ensure that the signal processing does not negatively impact performance of speech-related services based on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Thus, devices attempt to suppress noise as much as possible without deteriorating audio quality. On-device audio processing presents additional challenges relating to energy consumption, computational efficiency, and device capabilities. Many different devices use different noise reduction algorithms or different degrees of noise reduction even if using identical algorithms, which can lead multiple device-specific ASR models to increase performance. This approach creates significant duplication of effort and increases costs.